As the fall semester gets rolling, and I see all those cheery young students carrying their backpacks to class, I am reminded that almost every year, I irritate a few of those smiling young folks. At the semester’s end, I reliably get a student or two who complains that: “The professor obviously had political biases in the way he presented the information.” On the one hand, I shouldn’t let it bother me; my average student rating has hovered right near a straight A every year for many years now, and I’ve even won a few teaching awards. But I can’t help it. As I read through my evaluations at the semester’s end, I usually find myself paying less attention to all the comments that say “greatest professor I’ve ever had” than I pay to the small subset with something to complain about. And then rather than take joy in the very high average ratings and lovely compliments, I spend hours obsessing over the negatives. This is of course a natural feature of cognition, and, although annoying, the bias makes some sense. People are usually nice to one another, so when anyone stops being nice to you, it may be a sign that you are getting into real trouble. And of course, as a professor who will be teaching the same course again, perhaps I can change something in my later lectures to avoid a recurring problem in my class.
So what are my “political biases?” It seems that, despite my attempts to be evenhanded, the occasional student pegs me as one of those damned liberals. I certainly don’t lobby them to vote for particular candidates or to support any political cause, nor do I tell them how I vote. And I no longer sport the give-away appearance of the young hippie version of myself in grad school (as in the attached picture); I am now a conservatively dressed gray-haired fellow. I wear a dress-shirt with a button-downed collar to class, not my old Obama t-shirt. I don’t have a Sierra Club poster on my door. And when I talk about persuasion in class, I try to show them advertising tricks and malicious advertisements used by both liberals and conservatives.
But I get into trouble during the last week of class, when I talk about the interlinked problems of overpopulation, international conflict, and destruction of the environment. I don’t know why it is “liberal” to believe that the world would be better off if we could use psychological principles to slow the growth of world population, or to inspire people to reduce pollution, or to waste less of the world’s natural resources, or to avoid the next war before it starts. But apparently it is, at least to some segment of the population.
And yet I find it hard to believe that anyone regards it as “conservative” to favor a more crowded, polluted, and war-torn world. I realize that I am probably framing the issues in a biased way in the last sentence. So I’ll try to do something very difficult—to empathize with people who disagree with me. One possibility is that some people who regard themselves as conservative believe that overcrowding and pollution are over-rated as problems, and that we’ll figure out how to solve them in the future. And of course, it’s a rare quack on either side of the political fence who will say that war is a good thing. More likely, almost no one favors war, but people who regard themselves as conservative believe that war is a necessary evil. If you ignore some historical details of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, you might even believe that we’re fighting for “freedom.” If you are willing to admit that isn’t always so, you may argue that although we have a poor record of supporting freedom in other countries, we need to control those countries to maintain our own freedom. And if you know quite a bit about all these things, but are a tad bit cynical, you may flatly state that it is in our economic interest to get involved in certain conflicts, to control oil or other natural resources, or to prevent other countries from controlling those resources.
But there I go again, letting those damned biases slip in, and still feeling that the world would be a better place if we controlled overpopulation using means other than wars and if we quit destroying the environment. And I find it difficult to fathom that anyone believes that with a world population of 6.5 billion and growing, and incessant news stories about overharvested fish species going extinct, or about people in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan who can’t find clean water to drink or food to eat, or about environmental disasters like the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it would be a BAD thing to use try to use psychological principles to stem population control and help us conserve resources.
Related posts with liberal biases:
Want to show off your wealth and status: Buy a hybrid.
Atheistic liberals are smarter, but for a funny reason.
Is opposition to pot-smoking really just fear of sex?
How Al Gore, James Cameron, and YOU are destroying the earth.
